'Bud' Mahurin - Page 2

Secrets of War interview

"If you’re gonna cross the Yalu, for god’s sake,
turn off your identification friend or foe system, because we can track
you on radar," [the General told Mahurin and his comrades, after chewing them out for flying over China.]

So, that opened the door. We were really going to go
get them. But the JCS, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had only authorized
what they called 'hot pursuit'. If you were attacking a MiG, and had a
chance of shooting it down, you could cross the river.

Toward the end
of the war, when the peace negotiations looked promising, and nobody on
either side wanted to stir up trouble, they quit crossing the Yalu, but
it was a lot of fun. However, you didn’t want to get shot down over
Manchuria. This happened to a couple of guys, and they were held as
POWs for over six months after the war ended. The Chinese treated them
harshly, but eventually they came home.

Q: Who was in the cockpit of the MiG? Who was your enemy?

Mahurin: We were concerned by the information
that we were getting from
our radar controllers. We would get calls like, "Bandit flight now in
the Antung area." Our pilots would immediately zip up to Antung,
looking for the enemy. We wouldn’t find anybody, so we thought we were
getting misinformation.

I had the clearance which would allow me to go up to
that radar site. There I found that almost all the MiGs' air-to-ground
and air-to-air communication was in Russian. Our radar site had some
Russian-speaking controllers, who could hear their communications. As
soon the enemy controller ordered his flights to scramble, our guy
would receive that information in Russian. He would transmit in English
over to our controllers, who would then say that flight number one is
now in the Antung area. But it took quite a time for the enemy to climb
up to our altitude. We thought they’d be right there and didn’t allow
for the time lag. So our guys weren’t trusting our radar at all.

When I returned to our base, I told my pilots to
believe the reports from the radar site. We compensated for that time
lag by splitting our flights up into elements of two. Two aircraft
here, two there, two there, with flight leader discretion. Each leader
of two aircraft could go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, until
the commander in the air sent out different instructions. As a result,
if we had forty-eight aircraft in the air, there were two here, two
there, two there, all around in the sky.

The Russians couldn’t send up a big group of
MiG-15s, attacking two aircraft with forty, it didn’t make sense. It’s
a waste of airpower. So, the Russians would get squared away and try to
send in big numbers of MiGs to our little two and two and two. In the
meantime, the first guy that saw the formation would say, "I can see
them, they’re in the vicinity of so and so." So, all our pairs would
head for that location. As the Russians came down into our area,
elements here and there would start to tag them until we had all we
needed to attack. That represented a really big change in tactics, and
it was highly successful, because we were able to get into them pretty
good after that.

Q: You’re saying that these were all Russians. I thought we
were fighting the North Koreans.

Mahurin: They were predominantly Russian.
There were a small number of Chinese and North Korean pilots who would
talk in Chinese or Korean. Our controllers listened to their
communications. When those people took off, our controllers would call
us and say, "The Koshun flight is now in the air." And Koshun meant
kite flight to us, so every time we thought, "Boy, if we could only get
into those kite-flying guys we’ll have great success." We really did,
because they couldn’t fly well at all. But they were very few; the
Russian pilots predominated. We didn’t see very many Orientals. A
couple of times, the Communist controllers were confused, and they
actually intermingled the Russian airplanes with the Oriental
airplanes, and the Russians shot down their own allies, the Oriental
pilots. Our controllers heard this over their air-to-air
communications.

Q: You're in the cockpit of an F-86, and you’re out after a
MiG. Describe what’s going on in your mind and what you’re actually
doing with your aircraft.

Mahurin: It depends on the circumstances of
the combat. On several occasions, I dogfought, like World War I, with a
MiG. Once we started fighting about 37,000 feet, went around and around
down to the ground and back up to about 26,000, before I shot him down.
So that hadn’t changed much since World Wars One and Two. It was very
exciting and a lot of fun. On a couple of other occasions, we caught
them when they didn’t know we were there. That was just a matter of
going in and shooting down an unaware pilot. But we could outperform
them with the F-86's slab tail, we could turn faster than they could,
we could dive faster, and we could pull out quicker. We didn’t try to
climb with them, because they could climb higher than we could. We
tried to keep the combat on those elements where we had an advantage.
Whenever they were gaining an advantage, we could always leave, we
could always turn around and dive away.

When you talk to a pilot, especially a guy like me
who has a lot of years on him, his stories get better by the moment.
The next thing you know, his airplane was a dud, but due to sheer
combat capability he was able to shoot down twenty enemy aircraft.

Just after the war, a North Korean pilot named Ro
Kim Suk defected with a MiG-15 and landed at Kimpo airport just outside
of Seoul.
The MiG-15 was sent to Wright Field, and Chuck Yeager did the
performance tests on it, which revealed that the F-86s was slightly
faster. The Sabre had lots of combat capability that the MiG didn’t.
Above all, it had the creature comforts that I talked about earlier.
The MiG-15 wasn’t as good as the F-86, but all in all it was a pretty
good airplane. A lot of them have survived, and once in a while, F-86s
and MiGs show up at air shows, and it’s quite a sight to see them.
Especially when you realize that one of them used to be an enemy.

Q: I heard that the Russians copied the British 'Nene' jet
engine. So the Sabres were basically fighting against British engines.

Mahurin: The British scientist, Sir Frank
Whittle, had developed a jet engine that worked on a centrifugal
compressor. If you looked inside your washing machine and saw that
thing rotating around, in essence that was the thing that compressed
the air that went through burner chambers and then out the back end of
the MiG-15's engine. The only way to increase the performance of that
engine was to increase the size of that compressor. When you did that,
you increased the weight of the turbine wheel. Then the engine got to
the point where its increased performance didn’t compensate for the
added weight. So the centrifugal compressor engine eventually became
obsolete. But during the Korean War, it was pretty good for the MiG-15
and light enough so that it had a high performance.

But the F-86 was powered by the GE J-47, an axial
flow engine. This engine is like having a whole bunch of electric
fans stuck together, pumping air in and increasing compression. That
compressed air goes through the area where they have gas, and ignites
the fuel, and that goes through turbine wheels on the back end, and
that provides the forward thrust. Eventually, the world embraced the
axial flow engine.

Q: How was the F-86 modified in the course of the Korean War?

Mahurin: There was a lot of controversy about
our armament. The F-86 had six Browning fifty-caliber machine guns,
which fired a bullet slightly smaller in diameter than my thumb. The
MiGs used cannons, and one of the cannons was a thirty-seven
millimeter, an inch-and-a-half in diameter. Many people argued that our
guns were underpowered. So the Air Force put twenty-millimeter cannons
on some F-86s toward the end of the war, which flew combat in Korea.
But it was too late to equip all the F-86s that way. But those of us
who flew F-86s were satisfied with the six fifty-caliber machine guns.
It’s a tremendous amount of firepower. Until you actually see that
gunfire hit a locomotive, or a tank, or a building, and see all those
bullets hitting all at once, you have no idea of the power of that
fifty-caliber machine gun. It was incredible.

Q: How many seconds or minutes worth of ammunition are you
carrying, and what do you have to do to think through how to use that?

Mahurin: That depends on what effect you’re
having on the enemy. And you can tell the damage you’re doing. If
you’re not having much effect, you want to use it until you’re out of
ammunition, and then you want to go home. But, if there’s a lot of
enemy aircraft around, you obviously want to conserve the ammunition.

During World War II, we carried 450 rounds per gun,
and the P-47s that I flew had eight of those guns. The armorers used to
put five rounds of tracer ammunition before the last fifty rounds in
each gun. When we saw tracers, we knew we had fifty rounds per gun
left. I don’t know why we didn’t do that in Korea. Very few people ran
out of ammunition. I did several times, but mostly because I was
shooting up ground targets. When you fire three seconds worth of those
fifty-caliber bullets, it’s an awful lot of bullets, it’s an awful lot
of power. If you’re in the right position, you really don’t need any
more.

Captured

Q: Describe the incident when you were shot down.

Mahurin: We were trying to entice the MiGs to
come across the Yalu River and fight with us, so we started to carry
bombs in our F-86s. As the commander of a fighter group, you don’t call
your pilots in, to brief them on a new operation and say "Okay, you go
out there and go get ‘em, I’ve got some staff work to do." You like to
say, "Well, this is kind of experimental. I’ll lead the mission."

When we first decided to carry bombs in the F-86s,
we needed external fuel to get back home. We could only carry bombs on
the wing mount, so in our first bombing mission, we put a 500 pound
bomb on one side, and carried fuel on the other. We wanted to see how
far we could get, drop a bomb, and still have enough fuel to come back
home. That went off successfully, although our accuracy was terrible,
so the next mission we ran, we carried two 500 pound bombs and no
external fuel, to see how far we could get. Then we tried one 1,000
pound bomb and an external fuel tank, and calibrated how far we could
get, and how much fuel would be remaining.

On my last mission (May 13, 1952), I flew as a
leader; we carried two 1,000 pound bombs, and no external fuel. Halfway
up the bomb zone from where we were located, we bombed a rail
marshalling yard, from fairly low altitude, to see the impact of these
thousand pound bombs and to see what our accuracy was.

I was brought down by anti-aircraft fire, and by
foolishness. Combat fatigue can take a number of different forms. When
a pilot refuses to go on a mission, when he continually aborts with
engine trouble and malfunctioning instruments, or when he has a lot of
colds, that’s evidence that he’s losing his courage. But there’s
another form that says, "They can’t lay a gun on me, I’m invincible."
That’s where I was. I figured they couldn’t touch me. I was on the side
of God. I felt that we were doing the right thing for humanity.

As I rolled into my target, I saw a truck coming
into the target area. I thought to drop my bomb, and then go down to
strafe that truck. Back at the officer’s club bar, I would have a great
story to tell. As I got squared away to shoot up the truck, it turned
off the road. I increased power to climb out and was hit by ground
fire, about three or four times.

The cockpit filled with smoke; I opened
it up to
clear the smoke out, so I could see the instrument panel. I immediately
called my element leader and told him I’d been hit, could he see me. He
couldn’t find me because I had done something that we hadn’t briefed
on. He told me to switch to emergency channel on my radio, and that
used all the power that was left in the battery, so I couldn’t transmit
any more. I headed toward the Yellow Sea, where I hoped to ditch and get
picked up by helicopter. Passing over two more heavily defended towns,
I got hit three or four more times. I eventually just had to fly into
the ground. By then, my instrument panel showed both a forward
fire-warning light, and an aft fire-warning light. That usually is an
indication that you better do something. Fortunately I landed in a rice
paddy. I think I hit a telephone pole right before the airplane slapped
down on the ground. The fuselage broke loose from the wings and rolled
over a couple of times, and I ended up upside down with the tail going
in the direction that I’d been flying.

Q: Why didn't you eject?

Mahurin: I didn't eject because I was too low
when I'd been hit. The ejection seat hadn't been perfected yet. Only
about sixty percent of the guys that ejected survived. So, at low
altitude and knowing the odds, it wasn't really a choice. I preferred
to try to make it to the Yellow Sea, where I could ditch and then be
rescued by helicopter. Ejection was not an option.

Q: When you're bombing, how low to the ground are you? What
does the concussion feel like?

Mahurin: In modern air war, you really don't
hear the concussion because you're going too fast. But in World War
Two, there was a tremendous blast effect. But as a modern pilot, you
just don't hear it.

When we started to bomb with the F-86, we varied our
altitude. We started out about 15,000 feet and the last time, we were
down to about 6,000. None of us knew how to bomb with the F-86. We
hadn't had any practice; the whole thing was experimental. We were
rolling over and diving straight down in hopes that the bomb would
continue to drop straight down when we pulled out. It was horribly
inaccurate, but eventually, the Air Force ordered over 750 F-86 E's
that could carry bombs on stations underneath the wing, in addition to
its regular fuel load. These were called F-86 F's and they equipped
several wings in Korea with those new airplanes and thus came up with
an excellent dive bombing capability.

Q: Now you're a prisoner of war. What's going through your
mind? What kind of prisoner of war are you?

Mahurin: First off, you're exposed to
Orientals, and to people who have embraced the Communist philosophy.
Those things are hard for a person that was brought up in the United
States to cope with. When I was captured, I expected to be interrogated
along military matters and then sent to a POW camp. For the first
twenty or so days, I was interrogated by North Koreans; for the next
forty-five days, I was interrogated by English-speaking Chinese, all on
military matters. After that, I was taken north to a prison camp near
the Ao(?) River, where I stayed for the rest of the war.

I was interrogated on several occasions after that,
but suddenly the interrogations became political instead of military.
It's easy to say how big the F-86 is, what radio channels you use, and
that sort of thing, It was easy to tell them anything I wanted to
because the interrogators didn't know intimate military details. You're
apprehensive all the time because you're not gonna be treated by the
rules of the Geneva Convention. But, all of a sudden, the
interrogations took a different twist. They started to accuse me of
instigating a campaign of germ warfare against North Korea and China.

Q: Why did they think that? Was your aircraft were
disseminating germs or what? What was going on?

Mahurin: It was all a propaganda ploy. By
mid-1952, we were defeating the Chinese and the North Koreans again.
Earlier, MacArthur had reached the Yalu River and then had been driven
back to the thirty-eighth parallel, where the war had stagnated. But
even though the Chinese eventually committed over a million men in
North Korea, both the North Koreans and the Chinese had lost their will
to fight.

There were two Caucasians who acted as go-betweens
between the Communists and our newspeople down at Freedom Village in
Caysong(?). The only way our media got information on what was going on
on the enemy side was through these two individuals. One of them had
devised the germ warfare allegations to create the desire to fight on
the part of the North Koreans and the Chinese. The North Korean and
Chinese populations were susceptible to all kinds of infectious
diseases anyway. The countries aren't really clean even today in the
rural areas. So, if the people could be convinced that germs were being
dropped on them, they were gonna get mad.

Every captured airman was confronted with these
allegations. He had to confess to waging germ warfare in order to solve
his situation. We all knew that nothing like that was even considered,
we knew it wouldn't work, it was totally unfeasible. Yet the
interrogators sounded very knowledgeable. All you could do is say, "I
don't know anything about that." And they would continue the pressure
by asking you questions. "Are there any men in white uniforms at your
air base?" Clue, that's a clue. If you're gonna confess, you gotta have
men in white uniforms. "What did you carry in your fuel tanks?" Well,
that says you gotta have space in there for some kind of pestilence to
drop.

On and on and on came these leading questions. The
interrogations lasted hour after hour after hour. Because I was a
senior Air Force guy, they worked on me pretty heavily. They had to
have some organizational chain of command. An Air Force lieutenant
couldn't take responsibility for starting germ warfare. A junior
officer would have to look up the line and say, "Colonel Joe Blow came
into our organization and he started the germ warfare." So they worked
me over. Fortunately, they captured a Marine full colonel, and under
the interrogation: lack of food, no sleep, and terrible living
conditions, he finally confessed to waging germ warfare. And they laid
off me.

Q: Was there a lot of brainwashing among the prisoners of war?

Mahurin: The germ warfare was their main
thrust. A young Air Force captain would know the details of his
airplane and a little bit about his squadron commander, but he wouldn't
know anything about the conduct of the war. He didn't have any idea
what the headquarters were doing. But from a propaganda standpoint,
this germ warfare allegation could be useful. A POW could be convinced
to admit anything, using Pavlovian reflex conditioning, which we call
brainwashing. With lack of sleep and constant interrogations, these
young men confessed. If you come from Peoria and have a college
education, but haven't been exposed to the real world, and suddenly
professional Oriental interrogators are interrogating you, you're in a
fearful position. After the first four B-26 pilots confessed, every
captured airman was given the same treatment, so they would add more
confessions of germ warfare. All together about forty-nine of us
confessed, including me.

Q: What were the conditions in the POW camps?

Mahurin: I don't know about the camps. I
lived in solitary confinement, with no on to talk to except the
interrogators. The villages in North Korea and China have speaking
systems that are mounted on poles, so the propaganda was broadcast all
the time, music and news items and whatnot, based on what the
government wanted the populace to hear. At Christmas time, I heard Bing
Crosby singing White Christmas and all of that kinda stuff on that
speaking system. Once in a while, I could hear POWs marching by. I
could hear that, so I knew there was a prison camp nearby.

This Communist that I mentioned, who instigated the
germ warfare allegations, published articles describing the POW camps
like vacation paradises. The POWs had a hard time, but they were
together. Being isolated in your own mind, in your own facility without
any extraneous information, except what they wanted you to hear, was a
different circumstance.

Q: What were you involved in that was secret, that was
classified?

Mahurin: The main Korean war secret was the
Russian-speaking combat pilots. It was years before that became known
in the United States. Our government kept it quiet. I wrote a book,
called Honest John, later reprinted by Time-Life in a series
called Wings of War. I think it's out of print now. But people didn't
believe what I wrote in that book and I knew it to be an absolute
iron-clad fact.

Also I knew a lot of classified stuff because I had
worked for the Secretary of the Air Force. I'd been briefed on nuclear
weapons and I knew operational things that you would learn in the
course of normal duty, but the interrogators never asked me about any
of that.

Q: Were you involved with the guerrillas on the West Coast,
on the islands?

Mahurin: I didn't have any idea. Once, I
suspected a North Korean civilian was trying to talk to me. He asked me
what time it was. The interrogator shooed him away. Other than that I
had no idea that there was any covert activity going on in North Korea
at all. And it never occurred to me. Although when I was shot down in
France in World War II, I was involved in covert French operations. So
I knew it existed during World War II, but I didn't know it existed in
Korea at all.

Q: Did you know anything about Operation Hula(?).

Mahurin: No. When we were briefed by our
Intelligence Officers, they didn't get into any of that stuff because
we might get shot down and maybe divulge that information. I had no
idea that there was even an allegation of germ warfare until I was
exposed to that in prison camp. We told our pilots, "If you get
captured, we can't give you any concrete instructions. You know that
it's always been name, rank and serial number. But if you can't get
away with that, then tell 'em anything they want to know. You don't
know enough to influence the course of the war. You can do anything you
want to do, as long as you don't endanger other Americans by things
that you confess to or talk about."

I had acquired all my classified knowledge either in
the Pentagon or up on that radar site we spoke about earlier.

Q: When MacArthur was canned and Ridgeway came in, how did
Ridgeway's tactics or strategy affect you?

Mahurin: I didn't know much about Ridgeway.
He visited our base and I had briefed him and showed him the cockpit of
the airplane. When you looked in his eyes, brilliance came right back
out again. He was a sharp man, and dressed sharply in his uniform. He
asked all the right questions. He spent maybe forty-five minutes at our
base. But as far as his conduct of the war, it didn't have an impact at
all. I'm sure he did with the ground forces but not with us in the Air
Force. And if he had, I'm sure it would have been Ridgeway to General
Everest and then down to our staff and eventually to me at my level.

Q: Air Rescue. Pilots were shot down. They had to be rescued
from the sea or from the land, if the pilots could get to them, but how
did that go about? This was actually the first time the helicopter was
used. Tell me about that.

Mahurin: Air Rescue was a happenstance
operation. It depended upon whether or not the pilot looked as if he
had survived whatever brought him down. We had a radar site on a little
island called Cho Do, in the Yellow Sea. It was about half way between
the thirty-eighth parallel and the Manchurian border, about a mile out
in the ocean. Not far from Cho Do, there were shallow-water salt beds
where the Koreans would harvest salt. If you could go down or bail out
anywhere near those salt beds, we could send a helicopter from Cho Do
Island to pick you up and get you back to freedom.

As far as going after somebody that was shot down
while he was dive bombing or strafing, most of the fighter jet combat
took place at high altitude, so you didn't know where the pilot ended
up. But when it came to the ground support aircraft, we made every
effort we could to pick 'em up by helicopter.

In one instance a Russian pilot bailed out of his
MiG, into the Yellow Sea. We set up a rescue effort to try and get him.
Our helicopter was on its way, circling, and some MiGs came and shot
him in the water. Our guys saw that go on. The Russians didn't want us
parading a Russian pilot in front of the free world, because Russia
would then be condemned for having combat troops in North Korea. A lot
of Mickey Mouse stuff went on, as both the Chinese and Russians tried
to preserve a pristine approach to North Korea. So that poor guy was
killed. 'Boots' Blesse might have told you that he went after a MiG one
time and shot it down, and the guy bailed out. In order to corroborate
his claim, Boots turned his camera on and flew by this pilot in the
parachute. The pilot's helmet was gone; he had red hair; he was
Caucasian.

Blesse: Tell 'em about how horrible it was in
prison camp.

Mahurin: That just goes without saying.
Americans like to think that most of the world is like us. It's hard to
conceive what the general population in China is really like.
Eighty-five percent of China is agricultural. Only about fifteen
percent is city. The peasants that live in the mountains and on the
rice paddies live a completely different life than we can conceive of.
The same is true of the North Koreans and much of the world. When
you're exposed to the way those poor people live, it's an incredible
existence. I've never lived in such demeaning conditions. I couldn't
even visualize them until I got there, filth and disease that- I don't
know if there was disease or not because when I came out, the only
thing I suffered from was intestinal worms, but it just- it's
incredible, The things they eat are incredible. They were starving in
North Korea when I was there. The food I got was just barely enough to
sustain a person. As an American, I was accustomed to making sure that
everything was pasteurized and treated so it had no salmonella and all
that. Over there, you ate anything you could get, and the general
population ate the same way. Now the enlisted Chinese soldier generally
comes from the peasant villages, and when he joins the service, he has
a much better life than he could ever enjoy if he went back to his
village. He's given some uniforms, some clothes, and some food, and
they give him some minuscule education. He has a good life compared to
the ordinary peasants. So, the soldiers like that duty much more than
ours do. They don't complain about it.

I had a chance to observe them a little, because I
was always guarded by a squad of eight to fourteen guards, and they
kept in on me twenty-four hours a day. There was always a light on in
my cell, and so I could tell what they did and what they said by
watching 'em. If a guard said "Kaivan(?)" that meant he was going for
food. So I could track a little bit from my vantage point what was
going on, and I'll tell you, they don't have much to live for. That's
my view, but it's based on living here in the most fantastic culture in
the world today.

After his release from China in 1953, Col. Mahurin's
willingness to discuss brainwashing techniques and psychological
pressures applied to American POWs greatly aided the content of Air
Force survival courses.

Leaving active duty in 1956, Bud Mahurin entered
the aerospace industry and joined the Air Force Reserves, later
retiring as a Colonel.